The invention relates to a machine for automatically cutting cylindrical sleeves which have been guided onto a drawoff spindle. The cutting is effected by means of a plurality of coaxial, rotating circular knives. The cut sleeve portions are automatically delivered by means of a transport arrangement.
In order to cut prepared cylindrical sleeves or tubes, in particular those types of sleeves or tubes made of wound paper or cardboard, into a plurality of sleeve or tube sections, there result generally at both ends of the tube or sleeve waste sleeve sections, the length of which is smaller than the length of the cut sleeve sections of predetermined length. These waste pieces have to be disposed of because they would disturb the further processing of the cut sleeve sections. Heretofore it was customary with the aforedescribed arrangement to collect the correctly-sized sleeve sections together with the waste cut sleeve sections in a collection container into which they are dropped and then to sort cut the correctly-sized sleeve sections by hand. Such a procedure, however, is too expensive; furthermore, such a procedure does not fit into a fully-automated processing plane in which the cut sleeve sections are removed from the drawoff machine immediately into a further processing arrangement. An automatic separation of the waste cut sleeve sections from the correctly-sized sleeve sections in the drawoff machine presents, however, some serious difficulties because the waste cut sections generally, when comparing these two waste cut sections from each end, have different lengths.